If not God, What?

By Philip Davis

Some time after the publication of Middlemarch , a young friend put the question direct to George Eliot, ‘From whom did you draw the portrait of Casaubon?’ - Casaubon, the failed scholar, the man who never finished his great book. In reply, George Eliot ‘with a humorous solemnity, which was quite in earnest, nevertheless, pointed to her own heart’.

It is a great image of what I think The Victorians 1830-1880 is about - for two reasons. First, it is to be noted that George Eliot did not point to external sources, palming it off on Mark Pattison or Dr Brabant. She was Casaubon - in her own secret inner fear of failure. She did not feel like a transcendent genius: she felt more like the flawed characters in her own books. Very often, then, the great literature of this period was closer to quite ordinary sources of life than it had ever been before. And what is more, the paradoxical power of Victorian uncertainty - to which George Eliot was pointing - is one part of the story I have to tell.

Nor, secondly, did she point to her own head, as if in testimony to the powers of sheer cerebral inventiveness. The intelligence was personal and human, it was deep and rooted, and it was felt inwardly. That is to say, at its finest, Victorian seriousness is not dull or ponderous, but a passionate act of thinking in areas at once common and vital. ‘We are not sent into this world,’ wrote John Ruskin, ‘to do any thing into which we cannot put our hearts.’

In a time of uncertainty, profound social change, and confusion, it is that characteristic experience of thinking not in tidily, abstract categories but in the thick of specific human dilemmas which I have tried to portray. That is why - amidst the extraordinarily wide variety and almost reckless experimentation of Victorian writing - one crucial part of my book remains its defence of the Victorian realist novel.

Such an emphasis is hardly surprising, perhaps - and indeed this book does not set out to surprise its readers. I could not argue, for example, that Victorian literature is not about the old things so often associated with so-called Victorianism: Work, Marriage, Family, Vocation, Faith and Doubt, Society and the Individual, Democracy and Industrialization - and so on. But my belief is that the great realist novelist or the powerfully displaced poet takes these well-documented concerns to such a depth of living particularity that they no longer feel the same, whatever their public name. That is the sort of inner originality mostly on offer in Victorian literature - it is not entirely different from what you thought it was going to be about, it is just utterly redeemed from cliché, by being in its true reality much more serious, much more important, much more complex and strange and specific than you had ever supposed such ordinary things could be.

The Victorians 1830-1880 is a literary history. The works are not treated as currants to be stuck in the cake of history - illustrating this general theme or that widespread contradiction. Instead, the book shows literary language to be the deepest expression and test of all that was most powerful or disturbing in its age. It argues that literary thinking is the most important form of thinking available to the Victorians, a central holding-ground for all the overlapping problems that emerged in an age held in tension between religious and secular ways of beings. That is why, wherever possible, the book relies upon substantial direct quotation from the authors in question, rather than the language of paraphrase or external survey. In telling this grand story of the problems at the root of modern secularization, I want readers to get the very feel of the writers and the works under discussion.

After all, the period is itself like a great novel - a huge and shifting cast of characters involved in a series of great debates on fundamental questions of life and purpose. The quarrels and controversies - on freedom, liberalism and democracy, on marriage, tradition and women’s rights, on morality and the market, on culture, science and religion - make plain how misleading it is to speak of ‘the Victorians’ as an homogeneous entity. At a crucial time in the history of the Western conscience, it is as though almost every possible position, every thought that had been or could be thought, was fighting for its emergent place within the great melting-pot of dispute.

Arising out of that sense of a rich diversity, there are two questions which I have been most frequently asked by potential or interested readers. One question is: ‘Did you discover many forgotten authors or lost works that deserve renewed attention?’ My answer to this has to be based on my own ignorance - with regard to works which I, at least, did not know of beforehand or had badly under-estimated. So here, at random, is a partial list of some surprises to me, at any rate: Bulwer Lytton’s The Last of the Barons and Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia; Elizabeth Missing Sewell, The Experience of Life, Mrs Oliphant, A Beleaguered City, and Maria Edgeworth, Helen almost all the works of that uneven genius George MacDonald, culminating in Lilith; Browning’s ‘One Word More’, William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, and the whole phenomenon of the Victorian sequence poem (such as Christina Rossetti’s ‘Later Life’); Carlyle’s essay ‘Characteristics’ and F.W.H. Myers’s Human Personality, T.H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, the philosophers Adam Seth and James Ward, and the theologian Henry Scott Holland. These were some of my bonuses.

The final question is often something like: ‘But can you say in a few words what the book is about?’ My short-hand answer, my message in a bottle, has to be phrased, as often in Victorian matters, by means of another question. The sub-title of The Victorians 1830-1880, were it to have one, should be: If not God, what?

October 2002